Sandra Tsing Loh at the Santa Monica Public Library

Ah, simpler times.

Books and media about the modern-day dilemma of finding the “right” private school for your 4 year old to attend is so overdone. Someone needs to write a book about the travails of not interviewing, and not being interviewed by, elementary teacher-professors; about having to live with the fact that your horrible neighbors spawned their demon child the same time you did, which means their child is in your kid’s class, and there’s no imposed playroom interview to evaluate whether Chucky “fits in” with the class of ’09; and about not receiving weekly newsletter reports about how much the class is learning about organic farming.

I’m personally hoping that Tsing Loh also will offer an editorial on “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” an essay published in this month’s issue of The Atlantic Monthly. There, she uses her extramarital affair and subsequent divorce (“Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance”) as a vehicle to rail against marriage (“…isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?”). Even though she would have a bit more credibility if she wasn’t writing this in the aftermath of a tumultuous divorce, it is a fascinating read. Much more interesting than the kid’s story, anyway.

5 Replies to “Sandra Tsing Loh at the Santa Monica Public Library”

Just read that “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” essay. Oh. My. God. I love it. It just hammers home everything I’ve always been trepidatious of about marriage. Sandra may have saved me from decades of ambivalently wondering if I’d be happier married.

In contrast, I found “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” to be just another essay in which a woman who was in a crappy marriage uses her own personal experience and that of a few like-minded friends to argue against an entire institution instead of examining the possibility that it might just be their marriages that suck. (I am trying to find the link for an article I read last year that I felt the same way about, but my brain is not working at the moment and neither is my google-fu. I’ll get back to you if I track it down.)

I think Sandra is a smart woman, and a good writer (I thought “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” piece was very thought provoking)–but her “Loh Life” and “Loh Down on Science” pieces have always made me lunge for the off button on my radio…